With the rapid advent of aging society, a society in which an aged person may enjoy a healthy active life without requiring nursing care as far as possible and in which the aged person requiring the nursing care may live an independent life without clinical deterioration as far as possible is needed. In the future, as a need for the nursing care and domestic help increases, the number of helpers gets short if one helper looks after one user. Therefore, there is an increasing need for a mechatronics device such as a robot aimed to carry housework and the nursing care for the human by communicating with a human and performing the work such as the grasp of an object mainly in aged care facilities and families with an aged person.
Most of this type of robot devices are provided with a camera, detect or recognize an object in a working space based on an image taken by the camera, and perform the work such as the grasp. Therefore, when there is the dirt or the scratch on the lens of the camera, this significantly affects ability to detect/recognize an object, and this leads to deterioration in operation efficiency. When there is the dirt on a grasping unit of an object such as the hand, a grasped object gets dirty and this gives an adverse mental effect to someone who receives the object.
For example, a robot device, which compares a plurality of images in the same area to detect whether there is dirt on a lens of a camera from difference between images in the same area, is suggested (refer to Patent Document 1, for example). However, the robot device cannot detect whether the difference between the images in the same area is due to the dirt or a scratch on the lens of the camera, in other words, this cannot detect the difference between the dirt and the scratch on the lens of the camera. Also, the robot device cannot detect the dirt on a hand or detect the difference between the dirt and the scratch on the hand.